John Hewitt

John Hewitt is a veteran contributor to ExtremeTech, an engineer, and a neuroscientist. He's also the former owner of CRE Precision, a machine shop based near Philadelphia, specializing in the design and manufacture of instruments for biomedical research.

Researchers from Nanyang Technical University in Singapore have developed a new technology they think is already capable of the brain-like computing capabilities many have imagined for AI. Their design uses what they are calling ‘photonic synapses’ to create high speed and efficient networks of rudimentary neural elements.

Elite materials like graphene usually aren’t just lone success stories. Generally, the whole family of related materials — oxides, nitrides, or other derivatives — are all sought after for unique applications. As it typically happens, folks first imagine using a promising new material to store bits or energy, but then settle for trying to make…

The indexes of competitors like Yahoo and Bing (around 15 billion pages each) are still only half as large as Google. To close this gap, Microsoft has pioneered new technologies to make web crawling more efficient.